David Stern vs. Roger Goodell

THERE IS A STRONG chance that by midsummer, the N.B.A. will have joined the N.F.L. in locking out its players, and for this we can credit two men above all others, the commissioners David Stern and Roger Goodell. Stern’s N.B.A., which just had one of its least successful franchises (the Warriors) sell for a record $450 million, wants player salaries slashed by 38 percent. Goodell’s N.F.L., which has never been more profitable, wants 18 percent. Ponder for a moment that both commissioners are peddling what is essentially an upward redistribution of wealth into the hands of guys like Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban. It’s going to take some real salesmanship to get the public to go for that. So who’s better equipped to do it?

It’s rarely noted, but Stern has already presided over five lockouts during his tenure — two referee lockouts and three player lockouts — and he has won convincingly each time. What’s more, he has done it with so much outward charm that all anyone seems to remember about his record on labor relations is that once, during a relatively placid round of bargaining in 1994, Stern smiled and called himself Easy Dave. He has put a happy face on a Pinkerton’s soul.

By all accounts progressive in his private life, Stern nevertheless has employed the kinds of sotto voce appeals to our lower selves that we typically reserve for putting people in Congress. With a lockout looming, he once questioned certain players’ patriotism after they mused about boycotting the 1998 world championships, a little touch of Rove in the night. And he relentlessly bird-dogs his players’ conduct. Take his reaction to a couple of recent incidents. In 2004, a Pacers-Pistons slap fight spilled into the stands and became a beer-­chucking brawl. In 2006, Knicks and Nuggets players traded punches on the Madison Square Garden floor, right there in front of God and Spike Lee. Fights will happen, even in sports that aren’t hockey. The only thing unprecedented about these incidents was Stern’s response: 193 games in suspensions and more than $10 million in lost salary. And last fall — as collective-bargaining talks were getting under way — the N.B.A. began to crack down on players’ “excessive complaining,” which no one thought was a real problem until Stern made it one, again summoning the useful specter of a work force that must be brought to heel. Indeed, his reign has been an exercise in seizing and reseizing the league’s public image from its players — “Nasty, Brutish Athletes” went one notorious headline from the 1998-99 lockout — and it has worked out brilliantly: boogymen never have leverage at the negotiating table.

Goodell has borrowed liberally from Stern’s playbook, but his execution has been clumsier. His emphasis on personal conduct has occasioned a lot of selective moral grandstanding on subjects both big (Michael Vick’s dogfighting) and small (players’ trash-talking), betraying a misbegotten belief that football, which has introduced such phenomena as chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the Raiders, has anything to teach us about virtue. While Stern stares down a perceived culture of thuggery and, to casual fans, looks like Captain America, Goodell demonstrates his moral sinew by swinging around carefully selected individuals, thus reducing himself to a very well paid beat cop.

Goodell lacks Stern’s touch on a tactical level too. In January, Goodell sent an open letter to fans that made the claim that the N.F.L. faces the same financial hardships that they do: “Unfortunately, economic realities are forcing everyone to make tough choices, and the N.F.L. is no different.” (Stern can at least make the plausible claim that certain small-market N.B.A. teams are struggling, though that’s more a function of the league’s “big fish, little fish” economic structure than of runaway player salaries.) That Goodell would state against all evidence that the league’s economic underpinnings are grievously broken seems senseless; that he would continue to press his case for an extended 18-game season, just as we’re learning the extent of football’s physical toll, seems heartless. And the upshot of the letter from a negotiating perspective was that Goodell, in a very literal sense, had claimed authorship of the coming lockout.

Contrast that with a letter Stern sent to players during the 1998-99 lockout. He took the owners’ proposal to the league’s middle class, effectively driving a wedge between the game’s stars and the union’s rank and file. It was a very shrewd piece of business, a no-look pass of a letter that circumvented the union’s leadership and made a direct appeal to its most vulnerable members. Soon players were calling for a secret-ballot vote on the proposal, and the infighting that ensued created the impression that even the players themselves were unsure of their cause.

Stern is the model commissioner for our times. He has sold lockouts just as ably as he has sold replica jerseys. He has leveraged the right anxieties at the right moments, wringing another set of concessions out of the players and annexing a little more of their autonomy every time. Easy Dave will win his sixth lockout, if it comes to that, and he will win handily, smiling all the while, no matter how nasty and brutish he gets behind closed doors.

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2011, on page MM19 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: David Stern V. Roger Goodell. Today's Paper|Subscribe